New Left review

New Left Review, n° 1, pp. 122-129

economic engines;chemical plants;chemical warfare;capitalism;trade delegation

In this paper we show that inequality and unemployment are related positively across the European continent, within countries, between countries and through time. This contradicts the often-repeated view that unemployment in Europe is attributable to rigid wage structures, high minimum wages and generous social welfare systems. In fact, countries that possess the low inequality such systems produce experience less unemployment than those that do not. Moreover, large inter-country inequalities across Europe aggravate the continental unemployment problem. There is no paradox in low American unemployment. It stems in part from that country's continent-wide programs of redistribution, including the Social Security System, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the federal minimum wage, and a uniform regime of monetary policy geared toward full employment, all of which reduce inter-regional inequality and all of which we recommend for adoption by the European Union.

This article offers a critical reading of the World Bank's flagship annual World Development Reports from 1990 to 2001. It argues that behind the professed intent to free the world of poverty stands a project that Marx once described as ‘the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market’; its principal object is to deliver an exploitable global proletariat into the hands of capital. This involves drawing the poorest of the world’s population into the workforce, providing basic health and education, and focusing particularly on young women—lending the process its emancipatory tinge. But the larger part of this strategy, in which its central logic is betrayed, is to deny the poor any alternative, and to create a reserve army of labour that will enforce the disciplines of capitalist labour-markets across the greater part of humanity.

"What is the anti-globalization movement? I put the phrase in quote-marks because I immediately have two doubts about it. Is it really a movement? If it is a movement, is it anti-globalization?"

Jane Bennett presents a case for seeing matter as actant inside and alongside humankind, able to exert influence on moods, dispositions, decisions. Might food in fact be seen as possessing a form of agency? Vitality and volition in motifs from Thoreau and Nietzsche, viewed through the prism of the biological and physical sciences.

As stock markets plunge and governments scramble to bail out the finance sector, Robert Wade argues that we are exiting the neoliberal paradigm that has held sway since the 1980s. Causes and repercussions of the crisis, and errors of the model that brought it to fruition.

Africa’s largest city not as chaotic laboratory of urban form, but end result of a specific historical trajectory. Beyond Koolhaas’s diagrammatic insights, the real context of spiralling debts, kleptocrat elite, infra-structural collapse and burgeoning informal sector as factors in Lagos’s expansion.

Dispatch from dOCUMENTA, the quinquennial art exhibition in Kassel, where a rhetoric of diversity and 'anti-logocentrism' serves as smokescreen for the contradictions and complicities of the art business.

Homage to an outstanding figure of the European Left, who fought to preserve the link between radical thought and mass politics as Italy's Communist tradition dissolved around him.